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TRUE CRIME
by Alan Gold
Berkley Prime Crime, February 2005
304 pages
$6.50
ISBN: 0425201155


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Okay, I read it, I finished it and I still can't decide about TRUE CRIME. I think I liked more of it at the beginning than at the end. It's got a lot going for it, but that is to say, it's got a lot of problems, but . . .

TRUE CRIME is based, as the cover claims on a true 'incident' -- an author's note describes a real life double murder in a small Oregon town in 1997. And at first, the book read very cleanly and clearly like a true crime story, reporting the events from the perspective of a newspaperman who just happened to be in town.

Lou Tedesco is well-drawn, an interesting guy. Apparently a former minor-league baseball player with a very bad knee (something I never quite found in the narrative, but there's enough there; if he's appeared in other books, maybe that's where to find the backstory), he's now a critic and reviewer heading to the Oregon coast for a few days. And in this small tourist-oriented town, there are two dead bodies. And there are almost no cops, so the investigation falls on the shoulders of the guy in charge and his deputy.

While Lou is well drawn, I found both cops came out of a not very good television show. The chief is constantly too slit-eyed, arrogant and incompetent, and the deputy? He's good but don't name him Gar Loober for crying out loud. It telegraphs 'hick cop', doesn't it?

There are other things one is expected to swallow, including a scene in a forest with a ranger that I still believe would have destroyed the state's case against the murderers. And while the psychic in the story is, again, well-drawn, too many people just accept her 'testimony' as reason to do something. I'm not getting into that argument; I'm saying it would not work in court.

And while Tedesco (what is so hard about that name that one character calls him Tadusky all the time?) might have been a real reporter once, his boss, the editor doesn't know about a chain of evidence? Even if she's editing a weekly, don't newspaper folks follow the news? Even if she's small town (and she's not, by the way, this is a Portland paper), that she doesn't understand some basic stuff about crime and investigation was off-center.

Gold also tries way too hard to make it a happy story. Everything is for the better in the end, including some ludicrous 'redemption' stuff (I can't give it away, but no one recovers from that overnight, Mr Gold.)

Perhaps it was the author's desire to make sense of the senseless but this book winds up far too neatly. That's not to say that it's wrong to 'solve' the crime -- it's not. For one thing, the reader knows, having read the note, what the story is based on, so knows how it should come out.

I'm not sure whether it works that the author decided to add a more elaborate explanation at the end. I think the fact that it stands out so as a way of getting to the real truth means that it doesn't. But it might satisfy some readers who really want to understand crimes that don't seem to have real human motives.

I liked how Alan Gold writes, and many of his characterizations were solid and interesting, but the book deteriorated for me as he seemed to try to wrap things up more tidily than necessary. We can't always understand what happens and I guess I mistrust happy endings.

Reviewed by Andi Shechter, March 2005

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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